


Red Alert: The Temptation of Adam

by SafetyThirst



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bunker Feels, Cold War, F/M, Missile Launch Facility, Reylo - Freeform, it's definitely more interesting than these tags, wow that sounds dull
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-17 18:57:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafetyThirst/pseuds/SafetyThirst
Summary: How Ben Solo learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb.





	Red Alert: The Temptation of Adam

Ben Solo did not like people.

Maybe that's why he volunteered for the assignment. A year away from all but one person, with one simple task.

Push the button.

Of course, there's more to it than that. Wait for the signal THEN push the button. Don't do anything without a command. Don't question the command when given. (Ben recalled a story during that lesson, a close call saved by one man's hesitation.)

But it's simple. Live with one person in this confined space for a year. Don't kill each other and don't start a war without authorization.

On the first day of the mission, his transport pulled up to the silo entrance next to hers. Her. For whatever reason, maybe his own bias, he had assumed his partner for the next year would be a man. And fuck, she was pretty. His heart stopped for just a moment. Anxiety, he thought, that’s all that is. He isn't supposed to be anxious during this assignment; that was the focus of their first months of training. Stay calm so you can assess the commands properly. Calm. Young… he wasn't expecting someone young, either. Didn't she have something to live for on the outside?

“If this was the Cold War, we could keep each other warm,” he joked as the trucks drove off. Nerves, fuck, shake it off asshole.

She stared at him, straight-faced and contemptuous, before stepping through the hatch.

He followed, cursing himself. This was already off to a bad start.

“Hey, sorry. That was crass. I'm B… Adam.” He corrected himself; they had to use their code names. He wanted to use Kylo, a childhood dog’s name, but Command insisted it was too conspicuous.

“Marie.” She didn’t look up from checking her trunks. He shoved his hands in his pockets turned to his own stack.

“Are they going for religious or scientific?” The silence from her was making him uncomfortable, so he tried to fill the air.

She ignored the question and picked up a large trunk, then shot him a sharp look before walking through the tunnels to their separate quarters.

* * *

They tended to keep to themselves, waiting for the call and monitoring the warhead control room in shifts. Twelve hours on, four hours of free time, eight hours for sleep. In his evening free time, Ben would write, meditate, mess around on the guitar he bought in; then wake up an hour before the shift was to change. They only saw each other for the few moments they gave updates and documented their shift.

He knew so little of her but it was easy to memorize her routines. After he came in for the new shift, she would make her rations and disappear to her bunk in silence. She liked to sleep in and spent the 30 minutes before her shift luxuriating in the shower, then rush into the control room with still-dripping-wet hair. The scent of her bath wash would linger, the whole control room smelling like her even when “Adam” returned for his shift.

He often wondered if being so isolated made him more susceptible to a crush.

* * *

“Oh, you play?” Marie had spotted his guitar.

“Yeah, a bit. It keeps me sane, writing songs.”

He started bringing the guitar into the control room after the first week -- to pass the time, to distract himself from the isolation and to harness it.

“Can you play something for me?” She sat next to him on the extra chair, with her feet tucked under her legs. He wasn’t sure how, but she had begun to warm up to him after a month. Maybe that first bad introduction was forgotten. Maybe she was feeling the weight of isolation, too.

He gave her a small smile and played an old favorite, one his dad had taught him. As he plucked the first few chords of “The River”, his thoughts drifted to his father. Han, he was a good man. He had a good heart, but something in his face when the song played betrayed a deep wound.

“Now those memories come back to haunt me / They haunt me like a curse.”

He looked up to catch a tear rolling down her cheek.

“You play beautifully.”

He felt a slight warmth rise on his cheeks. “It was the first song I learned. My father, he uh… he wasn’t around a lot but...”

His voice caught in his throat, memories of his father’s funeral racing forward. Marie reached for his hand resting on the top of the guitar and gave it a squeeze.

“Ben... my name. It’s Ben.” His father would like to know he still used the name given to him in honor of another good man.

“I’m Rey.”

* * *

She started spending her free hours in the control room with him.

He started to do the same.

He would watch her chew the end of her pencil while she worked in one of the many crossword books she thought to bring. It was endearing, the way her brow would crease over a particularly difficult clue. He fidgeted with the cover on The Button. The one he was trained not to push. Not without command. Not without verifying the codes. Not without his partner.

“What’s that feeling when you stand at the edge of a cliff and wonder what it would be like to jump?”

“Is that a clue?”

“No.”

Ben squinted at her.

“Hmph. Well, the French call it l’appel du vide, or the call of the void.” He closed the cover and moved away from the panel.

“L’appel du vide.” Rey sounded wistful as she spoke. Maybe she considered it, too. For a moment, at least. She returned to her puzzle. “What five letters spell apocalypse?”

Ben gave it a few moments of thought before saying “W - W - I - I - I.”

She smiled. Maybe now she understood how she misjudged him.

* * *

He felt glad to wake up each morning. They had started to make the bunker more liveable, chasing away the damp and cold. Ben pinned their finished crosswords to the corkboard on the wall, framing the world map already there. Rey hung some blankets from the ceiling in the living space to create a canopy. It almost felt like a home.

Of sorts.

He began to imagine the future. She was there, though a ghost of the woman he knows in the present. It seemed impossible… that he would be worthy of her... And what kind of future had…. He glanced at the warhead.

He flipped the cover.

* * *

“Ben?”

He squinted into the bright light spilling through the small crack in the door.

“Ben, are you awake?”

“Yeah,” he groaned. “Is it time?”

“No. No, I’m… can I lay down? With you?”

He moved toward the wall, making room for her on his bed.

“I’m having a hard time,” she confessed as she lay down, on her back. “Down here. I miss …. My life? My work? Ugh, this sounds so stupid.”

“No no.” His voice was soft. “It makes perfect sense.”

“I was a writer, poetry,” she continued, her words spilling out in a rush. “I work in DoD, of course, but I wrote on the side. It was nothing. I was no one on the outside, really. Not when it came to my writing.”

“You are a writer.”

“What?” She finally turned to look at him.

“You are a writer. Just because you’re down here now doesn’t mean you stopped being a writer.”

She stared at him. He chewed the inside of his lip.

“Maybe you are nothing. But not down here. Not… not to me.”

There was a long silence. He swallowed hard and reached for her hand.

“Can you recite some poetry for me?”

She closed her eyes and let out a slow breath. He felt her grip his fingers, just slightly. His eyes drifted down.

“Fusion is the broken heart that’s lonely’s only thought.” She took a shaky breath in. “I never finished that one. But… You know… When you’re lonely, all you can think about is being together. When you’re together…”

He silenced her with a soft kiss, then another.

* * *

They moved the beds into one room after that. But it didn’t matter much. The kitchen counter was the right height, and the control room had sturdy chairs. Neither one slept very much anymore.

And it became routine. Rey would come into the control room long before her shift and run her hands through his now long hair.  _ Soft, so soft, _ she would hum before kissing his cheek, his neck, then straddling on his lap. She would reach down between them for his cock — stiff for her, always for her. They would fuck — make love, Ben would think to himself — every day, until they were exhausted and hungry, then ransack the rations, sitting side-by-side on the floor to eat.

As he sat alone in the control room, Ben could only think of the future, of the last day. They would walk back through the hatch. She would leave. Rey would leave and he would never see her again. They couldn’t. Even if it wasn’t against regulations, they couldn’t be together. He knew that. His eyes filled with tears.

He flipped the cover.

* * *

“Where do you think you can find love?”

They were on the floor again, laying on the sacks of rice and flour. Rey was staring at the map.

“Hmm… well, ‘home is where the heart is’ so… where’s home?”

Rey stood up, shivering slightly as the blanket fell from her naked form and her feet touched the cold, concrete floor. Ben watched as she walked to the corkboard and pulled a few pins from the crossword collage he made.

“My home before this assignment… here.” She put a pin in Washington D.C. “Before that… university, PhD and post-doc in Boston… MIT. I did my undergrad at University of Chicago. And before that...”

Ben noticed her voice change then her pause. She had turned towards the other side of the map.

“Secondary school, grammar school... foster homes. No love there.” Her steely voice seemed to hide a deep pain.

“Rey?”

She turned towards him, arms crossed over her naked breasts, suddenly vulnerable. “I was abandoned. In England. I fought my way through and moved here for university.”

He stood up and walked to the map. He pulled a pin off the board and held it up, forcing her to watch it.

“One pin. My love…” He placed the pin in the middle of the United States, no where in Kansas. “... is here. A top secret location, three hundred feet under the ground.”

She reached up to his neck and pulled him down for a kiss. It was not the desperate kiss of two lonely people, but slow and deep. Her lips soft and pliant, her tongue warm and eager.

He thought of the future again.

* * *

They had almost abandoned their duties. Why fight someone else’s war? Why fight when love was so sweet?

They lay in the bed together, staring into the dark.

“I miss the stars.”

“I miss the trees”

“The warhead is our tree.”

“We could carve our initials into it.”

“In a heart, like in the movies.”

“Yes. In a heart. Just like the movies.”

* * *

The assignment was nearing its end. Ben still imagined their future.

She wouldn’t want to be with the man he was on the surface, he was sure. Bitter, withdrawn, lonely - that’s what he would return to. This love… it has a half-life. As soon as they step through that hatch, it starts to decay. Probability dictates that it does. Half of all marriages end in divorce. How many non-married couples last?

They sat together on a chair - Rey on his lap, her head resting on his shoulder. Her breath was warm on his neck. He held her closer.

Ben spent too much time thinking. About the future. About The Big One. About W. W. I. I. I.

Would it matter? If the world ended? They would be protected here. They would have each other. She would hold him close, forever.

He flipped the cover, his thumb over The Button again.

Temptation.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [The Temptation of Adam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yff-JT4ptUI>) by Josh Ritter.
> 
> This story was a challenge to myself to write another one inspired by Josh’s intricate 3 minute stories. Their code names are taken from the song so calling him “Adam” was just coincidence. I wondered if I should use Kylo and Kira but decided to stick with the song lyrics. Also, this isn’t really the way that ICBM launch works but we’re going with it. But that close call Ben recalled at the beginning was based on a [real false alarm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident;). Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
